Birds

Here in a volume of great beauty is a collection of Walter Anderson's bird paintings and designs. The colorful array assembled here from the hundreds that he produced conveys the skill, the feelings, and the imagination of this fascinating creator.

Anderson, who lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was an artist, writer, and naturalist. His art has been the subject of many books, films, and exhibitions. He preferred to live in isolation from the mainstream, in the world of nature. When he died in 1965, the discovery of a trove of his art, the work of a master, revealed Walter Anderson's marvelous legacy.

In this volume Anderson's dominant theme, the union of all living things, is manifested in one of his favorite subjects, birds. In more than a hundred full-color plates Anderson's birds flutter and soar through these pages.

Birds, for this solitary artist, were the most accessible of models. He rendered images of birds in watercolor, oil, ink, pencil, clay, and wood. Motifs of birds adorn the decorative arts he created-plates, cups, wallpaper, and fabric. Birds reflect the evolution of his style and his methods just as they reveal his vision and its fulfillment.

For his daughter Mary Anderson Pickard, who provides a moving introduction for this astonishingly beautiful book, these pictures of birds speak strongly and personally of the man who was her father. "In them," she says, "his knowledge, his gift, his sensitivity and humor, and, above all, his vitality live on."